The retry policy is the real price of a prop firm passing service

If you compare prop firm passing services by headline fee, you will pick wrong about half the time. The number that decides what you actually spend is the retry policy — and most providers do not publish it. If you want to price your own situation rather than take a table on trust, the expected value of a prop firm challenge, in Python lets you plug your own pass rate and fee into the same arithmetic.

Here is the arithmetic that makes the difference visible.

The model

Let f be the fee, p the probability of passing a given attempt, and m the multiple of the fee charged on a retry (1.0 = full price again, 0.0 = free).

The expected spend per funded account is not f. It is:

import random

def cost_per_funded_account(fee, pass_prob, retry_multiplier, trials=20000, max_attempts=12):
    """Expected total spend to end up with one funded account.

    retry_multiplier: 1.0 -> a failed attempt costs the full fee again
                      0.5 -> retries are discounted
                      0.0 -> retries are free
    """
    total = 0.0
    for _ in range(trials):
        for attempt in range(1, max_attempts + 1):
            total += fee if attempt == 1 else fee * retry_multiplier
            if random.random() < pass_prob:
                break
    return total / trials

if __name__ == "__main__":
    for fee, mult in [(220, 0.0), (400, 0.0), (400, 1.0), (588, 1.0)]:
        print(f"${fee} fee, retry x{mult}: ${cost_per_funded_account(fee, 0.40, mult):,.0f}")

At a 40% pass rate:

$220 fee, retry x0.0:   $220
$400 fee, retry x0.0:   $400
$400 fee, retry x1.0:   $1,000
$588 fee, retry x1.0:   $1,470

The provider advertising $400 can cost you more than twice the one advertising $588. Nothing on either sales page tells you which column you are in, because the retry term is buried in checkout or not stated at all.

This is the whole problem with fee comparison tables. They compare the price of attempt one and call it the price of the service.

What the published prices actually are

I keep a dated table of what these services charge at two account sizes. Checked October 2026:

Provider	At $100k	At $200k	Model
ElitePropX	$220	$220	Flat, any size, retries covered
ThePropFirmPass	£449 (~$565)	Not published	Rises with size, from £349
PassYourProp	$588	$1,158	Size tiers
Pass Prop Challenges	$400	$700	Size tiers
Funded Traders Passing	Not published	Not published	Quote only

Two things stand out.

The spread is wider than the headline fees suggest. At $200k, the gap between the cheapest flat price and the highest published price is more than 5x. If you are comparing providers for a $200k account, the fee you read at $100k is not the fee you pay.

One of five does not publish a price at all. Quote-only pricing is not automatically bad, but it means you cannot compare it to anything without asking, and you cannot tell later whether the number moved.

Three questions that decide the real cost

1. What happens to a failed attempt? Free re-run, discounted, or full price again. This single answer moves the expected cost more than the fee does.
2. Does the fee change with account size? A flat fee removes size from the calculation. A tiered fee means the $100k price is marketing and the $200k price is the product.
3. Is there a profit split on the funded account? A profit share is not a lower fee, it is a fee paid later and contingent on the account surviving. It also gives the provider a position in your funded account.

Why the retry term is usually unstated

Because stating it makes the headline number look worse, and the headline number is what gets compared. A provider charging $400 with free retries and a provider charging $400 with full-price retries present identically until you are at checkout.

There is a structural version of this: a per-attempt fee is billable every time you fail, so the provider is paid more when you need more tries. That is not an accusation of bad faith, it is a description of the incentive. Fee models reward different behaviours, and you should know which behaviour your provider is being paid for.

The one thing to ask before you pay

"If the evaluation fails while you are running it, what do I owe you for the next attempt?"

Anything other than a clear answer is an answer. If the provider cannot state it in writing before you pay, the term that governs your loss is the one you did not read.

Worth adding: the firm's own reset charge is separate from the service fee and is usually not refundable either. Model both. The flat-fee model I run covers resets while the evaluation is running, which is the reason it is priced the way it is rather than per attempt.

Disclosure: I run ElitePropX, one of the providers in the table above — so treat the $220 line as our own price rather than an independent figure. The other four figures are from their public pricing pages, checked October 2026, and I can send the raw rows to anyone who wants to rebuild the table.